The Date
Well, it is Friday afternoon and The Shadow One is back again. My musing this week proves once again that life is truly stranger than the most creative fiction.
For -- whether you believe it or not -- this, my friends, is a true story.
* * *
Dating, as you're probably aware, is not what it used to be.
[Perhaps you're thinking: Wait one minute - how are you going to tie THIS thread into MTW? Don't worry, it will happen. Not sure how just yet, but it always does. Trust me.]
Recall the traditional dating situation: You, the male, spot the attractive female, usually through the glass bottom of some cheap beverage container. You approach, promising gifts, dinner, entertainment, and other nonsense which you have no intention of actually delivering unless absolutely required. Occasionally, she accepts and the two of you sport off for an evening that rids your wallet of all any and all excess cash. Afterwards, if you're lucky, you engage in a night of physical exertion which, when you awake the next morning, you pretend never happened. In fact, you pretend so well that sometimes you forget to call her again.
As you can see, I enjoy a traditional view of dating. Or to be completely fair, I enjoy a traditionally male view of dating. But when pressed, I can keep an open mind.
* * *
Despite my aversions to work, I do maintain a meaningful job. Two to be sure -- how meaningful they are depends upon the day of the week and whether any thought is required. Most days, we're scraping the bottom of the meaningful barrel. By day, I write for a living (something I can do from the comfort of my home.) [Ooooos and awhhhs sweep the room.] Please, be serious. I don't write anything fun, like books, stories, screenplays or an occasional musing for a deeply intellectual and socially responsible group of gamers. No, I write briefs, memos, wills, trusts, pleadings, beggings, accusings and other nonsense for lawyers who couldn't write a coherent sentence if threatened with the death penalty. Believe it or not, this pays at ten times the hourly rate my other job pays. But I deserve it. Letting Uncle Bob perform dental surgery with a Snap-On tool kit and no anaesthesia would be more enjoyable.
My other job serves only one function: without it, I'd never leave the house. Like a character from a Faulkner story, I would hide in my apartment, never leaving, having food and alcohol delivered. Eventually, the leprechauns, gnomes, trolls, and other creatures living under my bed would become even more real than they already are.
So, I have a night job. I work at a large metropolitan public library with six floors and far too many strange employees (as my own employment testifies). I'm on the second floor. Fiction and general biographies. Nothing too wild every happens there.
Until last week.
She was standing at the counter waiting when I looked up from my computer screen. I had just finished assessing a large fine against some unsuspecting patron (something that always brings a ray or two of sunshine into my life). She was, in a word, cute. Five feet tall, boy-cut blond hair, no make-up and, honestly, she didn't need any. Very blue eyes (they were either very blue or contacts, I never found out which). Body hugging jeans and spotless white tennis shoes. Oh, and a shirt proudly proclaiming she was a member of the University of [name omitted]'s pom-pom squad.
"Where can I find The Bridges of Madison County," she asked.
"In Iowa," I said, without batting an eye.
She laughed. Really and to her benefit, she laughed. That's all I needed. Upon receiving the slightest encouragement, I can imagine myself as a blond haired, skinny, four-eyed version of Cary Grant. Out comes the wit like a saber (or something ugly from beneath a raincoat, take your pick).
"No, seriously." Her smile revealed perfect teeth. Her dad was clearly a dentist.
"The book or the movie?" I asked.
"The book."
"Good."
"Why?" she asked.
"Because that's the worse movie ever made."
[Okay, I was stretching it a bit here. After all, the worse movie ever made, after Titanic, is some little piece of cinematic torture that my father (who must truly hate me) made me watch just before I left home for the University called The Return of Josey Wales. If I wasn't leaving home before I saw that movie, my bags were damn sure packed the next morning.]
"The worse movie ever made? I doubt it," she said as she followed me across the room. Yes, I was actually leading this young woman to a copy of the book. A female colleague rolled her eyes at me as I passed. I shrugged. Always be helpful, I say. Besides, a library can be a dangerous place. Am I the only one that reads Umberto Eco?
"No, really," I said, "it's a terrible movie. It could have ended Eastwood's career."
I found the book and went back to my desk. A few minutes later, she was back in all her blondness. "Where can I find the movie?"
I sighed. "It's going to be painful. Really."
"No, I want to see it." She was still laughing at, er, with me.
I found the movie for her. Of course, I found it – who the hell would check it out? She wanted to watch it there, at the library, so I showed her the private televisions, how to work the earphones and left her with a blessing that she might survive the experience.
We were closing for the night when she approached the desk again.
"What did you think?" I asked.
"I liked the movie," she said, laughing. Now this should have been my first clue, a warning sign written on the library wall in the hand of God: MENE, MENE, TEKEL, UPHARSIN.
"Tell me you're just kidding." I turned away to drop some books on a cart and when I turned back she was still standing there. "Can I help you with something else?" Actually, all this attention was starting to make me nervous.
"I don't know," she laughed, looking away. God, she was cute. "Would you want to go out sometime?"
Now, let me just say, this never happens to me. Every. (Actually, I'm sure you find that all too easy to believe.) I would have fainted, truly, if my female colleague wasn't now making gagging faces at me from across the room. Some people are soooo childish. "Of course," I said in my own voice, Cary Grant be damned. "How about tomorrow night?" I didn't want to give her a chance to reconsider.
"Sure," she said and she wrote her number, very cutely, on the back of an overdue book postcard, laughing as she did so.
* * *
Now, I don't mean to be presumptuous, but I assume some of you are sitting on the edge of your seats, hoping I'll skip right to the good part. You're the same crowd the fast-forwards through a movie to find all the, eh, revealing scenes. Let me put you out of your misery.
There is no good part. There isn't even a semi-good part. The Bridges of Madison County offers more sexual stimulation than my date.
I'll skip the preliminaries – the call to her house, the message left on insanely cheerful voice mail, random imaginings of how she must look in her uniform, how I picked her up (egghh, she didn't wear the uniform!), and our drive to the restaurant.
"I have to ask you a question," she said, after we received our drinks. (No, no, she didn't ask if I'd ever wore a kilt.) "Do you know what your type is?"
I was about spray out some comment about blonde, cute and easy, but I managed to bite my lip. "My type?"
"Yeah. Your Meyer-Briggs type."
Okay, it's a testament to the truly bizarre quality of the United States educational system that I actually know the answer to this question. There was a test given by the career placement office of my University, effectively administered AFTER we'd completed our undergraduate education. But what did this have to do anything? What, was she looking to hire me?
Hmm . . .
"I'm an INFJ," I told her.
Now, I swear on the Holy Mother herself, she reached into her eternally cute little backpack purse and pulled out a book. Apparently, it was a book about the Meyer-Briggs personality indicator. "Oh," she said cheerfully after flipping some pages, "you should be a librarian. You could also be a writer, an actor, a producer of PBS television and an artist."
Or an anarchist, an assassin or a terrorist, I almost added.
"Oh," she said suddenly, and this time her voice wasn't the least bit cheerful.
"What?" I could actually hear the footsteps of doom approaching our table like a drunken waiter.
"We are not compatible." She traced a few lines in her book with her cute, perfect finger. "Nope. Odd, because I really thought we were. But according to this, we're not. Too bad. I kinda liked you." She closed the book and put it back in her purse. Then she smiled that perfect white smile again. "Do you want to just go dutch?"
And that, my friends, was the end of the evening.
* * *
This experience troubles me. There is a very real feeling of loss (albeit tempered by the fact that I only spent less than five hours of my life with this woman). I feel the need to draw something from this encounter. Some bit of enlightenment, something to add to my understanding of the world. Oh, and to make sure I never, ever, allow this to happen to me again.
My mind turns to recollections of an easier time, when life was simple, when kings simply sent their daughters off across the board to marry foreign potentates for treaty purposes (BANG - there's the MTW reference – what do we have for the winner, Bob?), or when we just clubbed our dates over the head with a really heavy stick and dragged them home to be our wives (or concubines).
Or, to copy a page from Ancient Sparta, where they locked a couple of dozen men and women in a room with no lights to "mate up!" (And you always kinda hoped they included an equal number of men and women – but this was Ancient Greece, eh?) Can you imagine the groping, the grappling, the hasty attempts at measurement . . .
Today dating is very complicated. We have to be compatible. Like, white wine and fish, we have to go together. Fit the part. Be symmetric. We try to arrange our romantic lives with all the urgency of a feng shui club on drugs. And to insure compatibility, we rely upon religions, zodiac signs, online dating services, and now, apparently, personality types. All in a very pathetic and very human attempt to find happiness.
When I think about the date, I have to wonder what really bothers me? After all, did I expect to find a lifetime of happiness in blondness, white teeth and a mind that actually appreciated the subtle nuances of The Bridges of Madison County? Or is there something else, something more basic, that makes me want to pull the hair out of her head, one blonde strand at a time.
And then it hit me.
What really bothered me was that this woman feigned so much interest in me, smiling her white smile, laughing at my little jokes, asking me out, and then just dumped me over the side without so much as an amusing grope when she found out that I wasn't her "type." A man would never do that!
No, a man would have had sex first.
The Shadow One
Love is a disease. Avoid it at all costs.
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